Michael Deacon reviews the week's TV, including The Great British Bake Off and
Chickens.

Judges on talent shows are meant to be scary, butPaul Hollywoodof The Great British Bake Off (Tuesday, BBC Two) is scary in an unusual way. He’s scary not because of what he says, but because of what he does.

And what he does, a disconcerting amount of the time, is glower. When he and his fellow judge, Mary Berry, go round the kitchen to ask contestants how they’re getting on, note how often the camera cuts away to show a motionless Paul, silently glowering at them. A contestant will be talking to him, and instead of murmuring “Mmm” or “Right” or “Yeah” or “Great”, Paul just goes on glowering, with his cold, hungry, unblinking eyes. Which, to the contestants, must feel unnerving, given how big and burly he is.

Even when he talks he glowers at them. It’s as if he’s weighing up not the cakes but the contestants. But for what? Having analysed the matter at length, replaying footage and interviewing experts in body language, I’ve arrived at the only satisfactory explanation for Paul’s behaviour. Namely, that he isn’t a human being at all, but a skilfully disguised bear. To him, the people anxiously manhandling the pastry bags aren’t contestants. They’re dinner.

To give Paul credit, the disguise is effective – this episode was the first in series four, and he still hasn’t been rumbled. It helps that he’s learnt to pace himself. The contestant eliminated on Tuesday was a weedy specimen in grey knitwear, barely any meat on him. Paul has evidently decided to save the more succulent morsels for later.

The Great British Bake Off is the best-loved show on TV because people think it’s warm, reassuring, harmless. If only they knew the truth.

Chickens (Thursday, Sky1) is a new comedy featuring the two main stars of The Inbetweeners, the schoolboy sitcom that became a hit film. Here, Simon Bird and Joe Thomas, along with Jonny Sweet, play the only three young men left in an English village after the outbreak of the First World War. One’s a pacifist, one’s unfit for service, and the other’s a nitwit who’d be useless in the trenches anyway. In the eyes of women, though, all three are simply cowards.

I didn’t find Chickens as funny as The Inbetweeners. Maybe the comparison’s unfair, because the two are written by different people: The Inbetweeners was by Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, whereas Chickens is by Bird, Thomas and Sweet. Even so, the comparison is hard to avoid, because Bird and Thomas seem to be playing the same characters as they did in The Inbetweeners – or at least, playing different characters in the same way.

Bird’s character in Chickens, like his character in The Inbetweeners, veers between pompous, ingratiating and dryly pedantic. Thomas’s character in Chickens, like his character in The Inbetweeners, veers between earnest, needy and dryly pedantic. They speak in the same way, too: not just the same accents, but the same tone, the same tics. Same sort of jokes, as well: either crude or sarcastic.

All of which made it difficult for me to concentrate, because my brain kept whispering lines from The Inbetweeners like “Briefcase w-----!” and “You bumder!” To be fair, my brain does that quite a lot anyway, but they might have done more to help.

Top Boy, Channel 4’s drama about London drug dealers, returned on Tuesday. It’s good, but I find it hard to like, perhaps because I’m scared of everyone in it, including the children, who are all accomplished muggers by the time they’re on solids.

Among other things, Top Boy is a reminder of how much of life is down to the lottery of birth. The characters may be thugs, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid; they’re smart, ruthless, driven. If they’d been born into the well-heeled middle class, they’d be respectable businessmen. Instead they were born into angry squalor. They’re still businessmen; it’s just that their business is slightly messier.